Rethinking the Regional in Rājamatī’s World: Placemaking, Patronage and the Performance of Polity in Chanderi, c. 1479

Abstract

A bilingual inscription on a stepwell built in 1479 on the suburbs of Chanderi, Madhya Pradesh presents a rare biography of its patron Rājamatī, a female entertainer (bhāṭiṇi), who is said to have received extraordinary largesse from the Sultans of the seven regions of her time. In this gift economy, Rājamatī is not only the beneficiary of generous rewards but herself the benefactor of eminent men arriving from different regions. The rhetoric turns on her patronage of a water facility for travellers, portrayed as an honourable act of public piety (dānadharma) but also as an act of political performance (rājadharma), thus inscribing the influence of a provincial woman in the Persianate world of Hindustan. While such inscriptions constitute valuable documents of social history, they tend to be viewed as philological texts filtered for “credible facts” and “fantastic claims”. Instead, by reading the epigraph in its architectural landscape, I show how this discursive text shaped, and was shaped by, everyday places of interaction, a perspective that affords new insights into the practices of placemaking, patronage and performance through which a female entertainer acquired prestige and visibility in the broader cultural landscape of fifteenth-century North India.